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With the Sisters

Even if the Buenos Aires airport was the worst most unwelcoming place to Canadians my sisters made up for it with welcoming us into Argentina. They were up waiting for us when we arrived at midnight.

We hung out and yakked nonstop for a couple of hours and then we all went to bed. They had jetlag just like we did. We were 5 hours off of our California clock and still recovering from our huge time change of crossing the Pacific Ocean. It was a good thing that I came packing with some Vietnamese coffee to wake me up and it did the trick of getting me back on target. Vietnam supplies StarBucks so you know the coffee is good. My sister in law gave me some supplies when we saw them in Bali. Even with the added boost of the coffee we still did not get it together enough to leave the apartment that we rented until 3 pm.

We set out on a walk through Recoletta which is where we are staying now and got lost several times. Our goal was to walk our way to the bus station to buy our tickets to take us from Mendoza, Argentina over the Andes Mountains to Santiago, Chile. We finally found the station and thank God the Andesmar agent spoke English, which made it mucho easy. Most Argentineans do not speak any English and this would be one of the harder Spanish speaking countries to make yourself understood that I have ever experienced. This is my problem, not theirs but if they want to be an international destination then they are going to have to start learning English in school. Maybe they don’t want to, who knows? The bus tickets were only 330 pesos for my family of 3, so cheap like borsht.

After the bus depot we needed to find the Buquebus terminal to buy our ferry tickets across the water to Colonia, Uruguay. This is where Michelle my oldest sibling who was on map duty accidentally toured us through the warehouse / homeless / dockyard district. That was interesting and we had quite a few good laughs. We made it to the cruise ship terminal which we had no intention of finding and stopped for a much needed beverage. We forged ahead and eventually found the Buquebus only to be rejected by the ticket agent who could not find 6 seats on any of the ferries going to Colonia. We did not know that for the first time this year of 2011 Argentina established a National holiday for two days in a row and everyone and their dog was on holidays. That was disappointing and I guess Uruguay was not meant to be on this tour. Maybe another decade.

After the 6 km hike of the different lovely areas and the heat and a wining 7 year old we all decided to take a cab back to the apartment. Our cab driver got lost and we arrived 10 minutes later than the sisters. We got changed and got ready to go out for supper. We found a great restaurant that took children, 2 had turned us down before we found this one. It was a great and a fun experience but a shame about the food. I ordered a chicken salad and it truly was the most boring and drab food I have ever been served. It was served on a large plate of lettuce stacked into a flower type thing and two slabs of chicken heavily cooked with Rosemary. You had to flavour your salad with the oil and vinegar and salt provided. Many Argentinean restaurants do not even have pepper. No one really liked their meal; Dax would not even eat his home cut fries because they were flavourless. He liked my flavourless chicken though. The food was edible, just barely but the wine – Alamos Cabernet Sauvignon was amazing and this made up for the food. Well, Argentina is not known for its food, it is well known for wine. If anything we will all drop a little weight and walk off our wine calories if my sister Michelle has anything to say about it.